Grandpappy Carrot

Go ahead and laugh. Of all the carrots I have seen in my life, this one easily takes the title of “Grandpappy Carrot.” It came from a friend who for years has shared  produce from his large garden with us. That includes many carrots with humorous knobs and strings.  But none quite matched this one for size and weirdness.  We sometimes joked that he must lace his soil with radioactive substances to get such alien specimens. Of course, that’s not the case.  He’s very much into “natural foods,” and this is sometimes what happens.

As I stood at the sink scrubbing the dirt off “Grandpappy,” I admit that my mind was elsewhere, praying for people who drag around buckets of anxieties and worries. The Bible's take on this:
Cast all your cares upon him, because he cares for you. (I Peter 5:7)

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 4:6-7)

Who of you by worrying can add a single day to your life? (Luke 23:25)

Worrying implies that God isn’t big enough to take us through our cares and trials. Often, chronic worriers think that by piling up prayers, and enlisting others to pray-pray-pray, they’ll win God to their way of thinking of how He should run the world. 

I like how Roy Hession, an evangelist of the last century, expressed it in his now-classic book on revival, The Calvary Road.  Using a journey analogy to express the goal of peace with God and concern for others, he names the sins (like the weird growths on my Grandpappy Carrot) that impair us along the way: “self-pity, self-seeking, self-indulgence in thought or deed, sensitiveness, touchiness, self-defense, self-consciousness, shyness, reserve, worry, fear, and so on.”(1)

Such behaviors should be alien to the life of a believer. When we decide to follow God, He takes us (like that misshapen carrot), ugly character bumps and all. But He doesn’t leave us like that. The very trials and tribulations that we resist are part of His paring knife to shape us into the character of Christ. He is lovingly, intimately concerned about all our concerns and worries.

As for my Grandpappy Carrot, anybody hungry for carrot salad? 

(1) Roy Hession, The Calvary Road (Fort Washington, PA: Christian Literature Crusade, 1950), p. 54.